Twitter, among its many other uses – gossip fountain, bad joke haven, provider of front page headlines on a slow news day – is a great place to hang out for a fan of authors; at least those authors who genuinely use it as a diary and conversational tool rather than just for publicity. It's a bit like a huge virtual literary salon where even the dead and fictional are welcome, and so are you.

And maybe it's trivial to know that Salman Rushdie loves Carrie Fisher, quotes Clive James and is looking forward to seeing Hari Kunzru and Tom Stoppard at the Jaipur literary festival, but knowing random bits of information about people one admires just is, for whatever reason, enjoyable. It's like being friends with them, except they have no idea who you are, but it doesn't matter because this is still closer than you'd ever normally get. The illusion of intimacy is fun, providing you remain aware that it's an illusion.

And you often can get a conversation with a writer you admire, which is difficult to achieve any other way. It depends partly, of course, on how many other fans you're competing with. Neil Gaiman, with 1,500,000 followers, might be hard to reach, but Terry Pratchett with 45,000 could be easier, or Jeanette Winterson with 3,500. (It's interesting to look at the complicated correlation between the number of Twitter users celebrities have, and their actual fame: Paulo Coelho is the most popular novelist on Twitter, incidentally. Well, unless you count Stephen Fry.)

Some writers use Twitter for their own very specific purposes, of course. Alan Moore appeared on Twitter in January 2009 and stayed till March 2009. In that time, he wrote dozens of tweets, all sent to different users, virtually all of them identical: "I will be spitting venom all over the Watchmen Movie." Was he replying to people who'd contacted him? No, he just searched for people who had mentioned going to see Watchmen and, essentially, spammed them. He ended this reign of mild terror by tweeting a link to a piece in which he did indeed spit venom all over the Watchman movie, and promptly fell silent forever. A glorious example of someone using Twitter in precisely the way they wanted to. More than 4,000 people still follow him.